Market Barter Stand API

[Undefined]

This one is a long shot I know, it was bought up briefly on the stream yesterday and it's something I'd love to see.
I set up the Centralized trade hub last world, I had to abandon it due to RL Covid stuff, but am back in time for the new world and would like to do so again, however since old render clients are crash-tastic I'll not be able to run the main bot which collects the data I need until I solve the hurdle of running a pbot script 24/7.
I'm planning on working with the client source to try and get something in place but Java's not really my thing so I caveman-code in it a lot. It also made me think though that really relying on a bot to manually collect this data is a little counter-productive.

What I'd really love to see is some sort of construct like a trade beacon (perhaps requiring meteoric iron ) that you could build in a village which then collects the buy/sell data of the barter stands, either in a radius or under the village claim and makes that data available via an external API in whatever structure/format is convenient.

This would allow me to simply build a front-end that parses and presents that data without the whole bot running around and collecting it part. I think the centralized market was an awesome way of having regulated global pricing and value, allow players to keep up with commonly available qualities and even trade between markets to get the best deals.

[MagicManICT]

+1 to this. This is effectively what Grinding Gear Games did for Path of Exile trading for years--had a web API that 3rd parties could parse that provided what the players had listed for trade in the game so they could provide front ends to make finding a trade easy.

The only issue I can see is the same problem as previous--making the trip and finding it sold out just before I got there. Well, that and the server load this might cause when others try to access such information themselves for a similar type web app.

[VDZ]

The only issue I can see is the same problem as previous--making the trip and finding it sold out just before I got there.

This is much more likely if this is tracked manually rather than automatically provided.

Well, that and the server load this might cause when others try to access such information themselves for a similar type web app.

Rate limiting should help with that; this should involve a small amount of clients making large amounts of requests, which tends to be a lot easier to solve than many clients making few requests.

[meus]

It might be cached and updated e.g. every half an hour, so the database isn't queried directly each time a player browses the market. (not sure if PoE has it with the "item not found", too)

The time it would take to travel would anyway be long enough for the caching to not have a significant effect - inconsistency between the market stalls and the listings. Otherwise, if a person is quite near, they would anyway be able to check the sale immediately.

But still the advantage would be being able to search directly instead of walking around the market(s). This, of course, if the developers agree to implement it.